pocket knife

       My old man was six foot three, and three hundred twenty pounds, they called him junior until he was about six years old. Too big they said, they called him Bud. He had hands as hard and coarse as pumice, and a beard thick and proud, made of steel wool or cotton depending on which side of his fence you were on. He worked all week cutting concrete and never brought it home. Baseball practice after dinner, and he would drive. A joint while reading Louis Lamar watching one of his boys play ball, never a complaint. He asked nothing in return except twenty minutes alone to shit which he hardly ever got. He loved my mom hard, and with a subtle grace no rugged man should know.  
      I lost my pop thirteen years ago when I had just become a man, only a pup of a beard on my face. I have honored and embarrassed his memory countless times in those years. I have loved hard and subtle, but without the balance and grace that he displayed. I have been to the same prisons he had been to without learning the lessons he would have beat out of me.
      I recently found a small pocket  knife that he left in the back of a drawer. Tarnished and dull I remembered how he used to go on and on about the value of good steel. I have now run that old three inch piece of metal towards and against stone for several hours. As the edge and the shine come back through I want to kiss my mother and grow back my beard